


we are but ghosts of what we once were

by rarmaster



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: BUT ONCE THE DEED WAS DONE I LEANED INTO HTE ANGST, FFX AU, Gen, IT WASN'T EVEN MY DECISION LMFAO, who. let us make kratos sin.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2020-12-27 11:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21118283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: Anna has spent a lot of time talking to Sin.He's her husband, after all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i ended up changing the title for Reasons, but mostly to allow a little more wiggle room for if i wanna write about any of my other muses involved in this AU bc there's some juicy mithos bits--

Anna has spent a lot of time talking to Sin.

It’s easiest during travel, those moments after right leaving Zanarkand’s dream but just before you pass the boundary of Sin and out into Spira. A few, fleeting minutes where their consciousnesses cross, long enough for a conversation but not much else. But what’s _special _about these minutes is that—fleeting or not—they can exist in the same space physically, just for a bit. She can see Kratos’ face.

Which means she can watch as, over the years, his captivity takes its toll on him. His hair, always a mess, gets messier, greasier, his skin gets paler, he develops bags under his eyes, loses weight. He’s a dream, so none of these physical things _matter, _except in that they reflect how he feels, mentally. He smiles less. The spark of hope in his eyes has been replaced by fear. He used to stand a lot, used to walk around when Anna visited him like he was kind of restless. Now he sits. Barely moves. Like he doesn’t have the energy.

So, Anna wasn’t expecting anything pretty, exactly, when she came to visit him this time.

But neither was she expecting _this._

Kratos is on his hands and knees, red hair falling down around his face, hiding it and his expression. But nothing can hide the way his chest shakes with sobs. Nothing can hide the hitch in his breathing, the cry in his voice that cracks like he’s been crying for a _while, _until his throat became sore.

“Kratos?” Anna asks, cautiously—but _quickly _making her way towards him, knowing that even though dreams have a somewhat liquid definition of time, their time together is still limited. “Kratos, what happened?”

“Luca,” he gets out, between pained gasps.

“What about it?” Anna presses, with a sinking feeling in her gut because she thinks she already knows. She puts a hand on Kratos’ shoulder, gripping it as tight as she can when they aren’t _quite _on meeting planes of existence. She doesn’t pass through him, or anything. But it’s still more like the _idea _of touch, rather than the physical sensation of it. It’s all she can offer him. “Come on, Kratos, breathe. It’s okay.”

“I- I-” he gasps, trembling. “I—attacked—Luca.”

Anna squeezes her eyes shut with her horror, her grief, breathes tight.

“_Sin_—attacked—Luca,” Kratos corrects, but his voice shapes around the words like he doesn’t really think there’s a difference.

“Kratos,” Anna says, as soothingly as she can when her heart’s in her _goddamn throat_. “Kratos, it’s okay, it’s not your fault—”

“I thought—I could—stop it. I thought—that I could—thought I could hold Sin _back_.” Anna shifts, wraps her arms around Kratos’ shoulders and waist, tugging him to her, with the intention of supporting his weight as he buries his face in her neck and cries. It’s still only the _idea _of the action, not quite solid, not nearly enough for her but she just prays to a god she doesn’t think is real that it helps _him_. “But I—I couldn’t—I was powerless.”

“Shh,” Anna says. “Shh.”

“You should have seen it—Anna—it was—there were so many—so many people _died_—and it was all—I couldn’t do anything—_Anna_, _I couldn’t stop it._”

“I know, I know,” she says, petting his hair and praying he can feel it better than she can. “It’s not your fault, Kratos. I promise. _Sin _did this, not you.”

“We’re the same thing.”

“That doesn’t matter—”

“_I should have been able to stop it!_”

And there’s _anger _in his voice, along with the despair, the weight of his words reverberating against her skin from where his breath meets her neck and his hands tremble against her back. Nothing she can say, nothing she can do, will convince him that he is not to blame for this. Nothing she can say, nothing she can do, will pluck the horrors out of his mind and memory. He has to live, every breath, every moment, as the embodiment of Spira’s destruction. He has to do that, and somehow, not break.

Anna trembles, for a second, as Kratos’ despair stirs her grief. If she were in Spira, and not this in-between dream, she thinks the pyreflies that hold together her unsent body would have rippled, the strength of her grief disjointing her will on them. She feels disjointed as it is, even though pyreflies are much better at holding shapes together in dreams.

She takes a deep breath. Pulls herself together.

“Next time,” she begins.

“_I don’t want there to be a next time!_”

“Next time,” Anna insists, tears burning in her eyes when faced with Kratos’ almost childlike anguish—“You’ll stop it next time. This was the first time Sin has had enough strength to attack in years, right? So you weren’t expecting it. Neither was Spira. So- so of course it was bad. Next time it won’t be. Next time you’ll be ready.”

Kratos doesn’t say anything, but he breathes, deeper and steadier than before.

“You just have to hang in there,” Anna tells him.

“Have you…?” Kratos begins, the start of a question he does not have the strength to finish, but that’s okay, because he doesn’t need to finish it for Anna to know what he’s asking. Has she found a way to break the cycle. To stop Sin. For good.

Anna shifts, the not-quite-sensation of Kratos pressed against her becoming more than she can bear because it isn’t _real _enough, but he doesn’t seem to want to move, so she’ll have to bear it anyway. “A few leads,” she tells him, gentle, her laugh nervous. “It’s just—I need a Summoner to reach Yggdrasill before I can try anything. And no one’s been going on pilgrimages.”

“They will be now,” Kratos says, grim.

“Yeah,” Anna croaks. “So—just a little longer, okay? Just a little longer.”

“Okay.”

Then Kratos jolts, dislodging himself from her hold.

“You need to go,” he says, urgent. “It’s—it’s time.”

He’s always been better aware of how exactly her consciousness overlaps with his in these moments of dreamlike transition, so Anna doesn’t question. (_She does wonder, though, if this is a Kratos thing, or a Sin thing._) She just grabs his face as well as she can and presses a kiss to his forehead.

“Okay,” she tells him. “I’ll—” _See you soon, _except she won’t, and even if she did, it wouldn’t be under circumstances he wants. “I’ll fix this, okay? I’ll fix it.”

And then she lets the dream whisk her away.

She already knows what’s happened before she can even ask Kratos.

She passes through here infrequently enough that she hasn’t seen him like this many times—but it’s hard to mistake. Sin’s attacked somewhere again. Recently. Very, _very _recently.

Anna moves towards him without saying anything, all but falling to the ground beside him, moving for a hug but before she gets to it he’s collapsed into her lap, chin on her thigh as he wraps one arm around her waist and clings. She lets him, silent, shaking. Runs fingers through his tangled hair as he cries. For all the times she has visited him like this, the sensation of touch has gotten no more familiar, no more comfortable, not to her. The distance enforced by the fact only their dreams are intersecting while what passes for physical forms for them are in two very separate locations is still too off, too cold for Anna to enjoy it. But it helps Kratos. So.

“Hey,” she says, the only word she can think of for a moment. “Kratos,” she gets out, a second later, eyes burning with tears. Kratos has grey in his hair. She can’t pull her eyes away from it, can’t do anything but run her fingers through the streak again and again. “It’s- it’s okay. Really. It’s—”

“It’s not okay,” he interjects, quiet and furious. “It’s not—stopping. I can’t _stop it_.”

“Kratos…”

He trembles in her grasp, trembles and sobs and it’s not _fair, _for him to have heaped all of this onto his own shoulders. He never, ever, would have been able to stop Sin from doing what Sin does. Mitigating the damage was all he could ever hope for. But that isn’t enough, for Kratos. It was never going to _be _enough.

Anna knows her husband. His heart is so soft, and his worries so big. He used to blame himself for Lloyd getting hurt because he’d done something as simple as blinked the exact second Lloyd tripped. No wonder he blames himself for all of Spira.

It’s still too much blame for one man to shoulder.

He clings to her tighter. Grips her like she’s his only lifeline.

“I want it—to stop,” he begs, voice tight, each word a battle. “Please, Anna—_Please_—make it stop.”

Anna swallows. Her fingers tighten around the grey in his hair.

“I will,” she promises.

Even if Mithos’ plan doesn’t work.

Even if she has to become Sin, instead.

She will.


	2. Chapter 2

She missed Spira.  
  
The smell of _this_ sea, the breeze on her face, the way the wooden boards of Kilika’s pathways give under her feet. Sturdy, but more flexible than stone. Yuan had shoved Kratos into the water here, once upon a time. And then Anna had shoved Yuan in after him, laughing the whole while-- blasphemy, to shove the Summoner you’re guarding? Maybe, but Yuan had seemed fond under all the spluttering and cold shoulder he tried to give her the rest of the day, and Kratos had laughed soft and sweet and...  
  
There’s a sound that isn’t a sound, exactly. It’s something that hums in her bones, sings in her heart.  
  
She turns to its source with a sad smile, even as all the people around her either start trembling in terror or start running.  
  
“Hey,” she says, gently, as she stares Sin down, stares her _husband_ down. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”  
  
He doesn't answer. Not exactly. Once upon a time, he would have. Once upon a time, she used to be able to hear his voice. Now all she gets is vague images. Herself, laughing. Lloyd, when he was young and riding on her shoulders. Home back in Zanarkand, for a moment, then Yuan, beautiful and terrifying. Grief tugs at Anna's heart, as she takes this to mean he misses home, misses Yuan, misses her. And then:  
  
A fuzzy image of Lloyd, kicking the blitzball into the goal before he turns and laughs proudly at the crowd. Something Anna recognizes as happening-- just hours ago, was it? She laughs, tears startled into her eyes.  
  
"You got to see it too, huh? That's good. I'm glad."  
  
Kratos still doesn't have any words, but he does have a stronger image of Lloyd, young, holding a blitzball and grinning brightly.  
  
"I think he's in Besaid," Anna says, though she's not sure if that's the question Kratos is asking. "That's what Mithos said."  
  
An image of a dragon, cut off abruptly. Anna blinks, really takes in the horizon before her. Sin is so close to Kilika, now.  
  
"It's not your fault," Anna tells him, as she starts backing up, trying to judge the range of destruction and get out of the way. It'd be difficult for just anyone to kill her, now, but Sin could probably manage it. "It's not your fault," she repeats. "Just-- hang in there. I'll find a summoner, soon, and then... We'll figure something out. It's not your fault."  
  
There's nothing to do but watch, so Anna does, washing down the sight with a little booze. At least the damage is minimal. Even still, Kratos is resisting, isn't he?  
  
"You should get out of here," comes a voice, from beside Anna. If she didn't recognize it, she'd be startled.  
  
"Hi Mithos," she says, tired, not even turning to the boy fayth.  
  
"The summoner will be doing the sending, soon."  
  
Anna perks up, a little. "A summoner!" she says, delighted. She wonders if this one will be better than the others. It's difficult to judge that, really, but Anna thinks she'll know which one could be the one to help her, once she sees them. And if she doesn't know, then Mithos will tell her. He's working just as hard to see this end as she is.  
  
"The _sending_," Mithos repeats, firm, and Anna remembers herself.  
  
"Right," she says, and she moves further away from the beach. Tomorrow. She'll try and catch them tomorrow.


End file.
